Salesperson performance in the wake of customer interest in digital technology: The role of job engagement as a resilience cushion

Despite growing interest in salespeople’s social media use, the role of customers in motivating and shaping such use has received limited scholarly attention. Moreover, little is known about whether—and how—social media use enhances salespeople’s effectiveness in managing service recovery situations. Using the conservation of resources theory and analyzing matched survey responses from B2B salespeople and their managers, we find that while customer interest in digital technology has a curvilinear (inverted U-shape) relationship with salesperson social media use, this relationship decreases at higher levels of job engagement, indicating that salespeople with high job engagement have greater resources to manage the stress caused by customer interest in digital technology. Moreover, social media use improves manager-rated salesperson service recovery performance. The study offers significant implications for both theory and practice.